I really like this Worlds in Motion interview with Ed Stark and Dave Williams from Red 5. They bring up a lot of cool ideas about how to extend the playing experience of a game by letting gamers influence their environment and providing specific feedback from their actions into the environment. I think there is a lot of opportunity to host exciting, growing games that take cues from games like Dungeons & Dragons, where you give players the opportunities to craft their own adventures or build parts of their own worlds.
I think games like Spore and Second Life as well as other User-Generated content sites have shown that there is a significant quantity of people who like taking the reins and creating (reasonably decent) content. All of the penises and other sexual-content notwithstanding, users will create enough fun stuff that can support really large user communities, as long as the concept has mass-market appeal. By focusing on user-generated content, there are some key implications for the game’s business model:
1. Make great in-game tools that are easy to use – content creators are a freaking pain, as you have to balance richness of experience with ease-of-use. Second Life is not the exemplar for this (esp with the knock-on performance impact), but Spore’s tools seem to be pretty good, but I haven’t seen anything really great yet.
2. Balance basic storyline/games with those created by users, then figure out how much NPC/AI logic and procedural content you can (need to) build - there is a certain amount of action needed to get people in and playing your game, without which you will lose your noobs before they really figure out how to get into the cool stuff. Build enough of that, and then create scalable game logic that can populate the rest of the world. Hard questions will be figuring out complicated things like sound (do you have a UGC sound creator?), and boring jobs like store clerks (which NO ONE really likes to do)
3. In-house vs. community vs. procedural Content Management – how do you keep the world exciting and also keep the peace? Studies have shown there is a sufficiently sizable portion of users that will create good content, and in fact, that is their preferred method of game-play. How do you get those users engaged (and keep them making cool content for free) while keeping the griefers isolated, or at least minimize their impact? Community management is a big part of running a virtual world/MMO, but it is also a substantial on-going cost that could be reduced with clever software or strong user communities.
I think the key to making a highly scalable user-generated world work is really well designed and easy to use technology. With long development cycles, and a lot of necessary user-testing this will prove a large up-front investment, but the long tail is broad adoption with lower on-going development costs, as your user community off-loads these costs.
Tags: MMOs, User-Generated Content, Virtual Worlds
